Hedge-Fund Magnate Robert Mercer Emerges as a Generous Backer of Cruz

WASHINGTON — The two men share a passion for unbridled markets, concerns about the Internal Revenue Service and a skeptical view of climate change.

Now the two — Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Robert Mercer, a Wall Street hedge-fund magnate — share another bond that could link them through November 2016: Both want to see Mr. Cruz elected president.

Mr. Mercer, a reclusive Long Islander who started at I.B.M. and made his fortune using computer patterns to outsmart the stock market, emerged this week as a key early bankroller of Mr. Cruz’s surprisingly fast campaign start. He is believed to be the main donor behind a network of four “super PACs” supporting Mr. Cruz that reported raising $31 million just a few weeks into his campaign.

The emergence of rich and relatively low-profile donors like Mr. Mercer could single-handedly jump-start a presidential campaign, said Trevor Potter, a campaign finance lawyer who served as a Republican member of the Federal Election Commission.

“It just takes a random billionaire to change a race and maybe change the country,” Mr. Potter said. “That’s what’s so radically different now.”

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Robert MercerCreditAndrew Toth/Getty Images

Mr. Mercer does not have the name recognition of fellow Republican financiers like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, but he has spent more than $15 million since 2012 in support of conservative political campaigns and causes, donating to a number of candidates who had never even met him. Both moderate Republican candidates and Democrats in states like Iowa, New York and Oregon have found themselves in the cross hairs of expensive attack ads that he financed.

Mr. Mercer “is a very low-profile guy, but he’s becoming a bigger and bigger player,” said Bradley A. Smith, a campaign finance expert who was a Republican appointee on the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Mercer’s financial support for Mr. Cruz “sends the message to other donors that Cruz is a serious guy,” Mr. Smith said, “and that brings in other donors.”

Rep. Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, remembers with some bitterness Mr. Mercer’s opposition to his re-election campaign in 2014 when he spent about $650,000 on attack ads and other efforts in support of a conservative challenger.

“I don’t think the guy had ever even been to Oregon,” Mr. DeFazio said. He said he believed Mr. Mercer targeted him in part because of legislation Mr. DeFazio sponsored that threatened higher taxes for hedge funds like Mr. Mercer’s fund, Renaissance Technologies.

He is also an example of how wealthy donors have been empowered by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the landmark Citizens United case, which paved the way for super PACs. Unlike candidates, super PACs can accept unlimited amounts of money from individuals and corporations to support a candidate so long as they do not officially “coordinate” with the campaign. Many moneyed Wall Street veterans enjoy playing the political game, hosting fund-raisers and speaking publicly about the horse they are backing. Mr. Mercer is not one of them. A computer scientist by training, he is more at ease crunching numbers than pressing the flesh. Mr. Mercer declined to comment.

He prefers to stay quiet about most things. After receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics at an event last year, Mr. Mercer told the audience he was daunted by the prospect of speaking there for an hour, “which, by the way, is more than I typically talk in a month so it’s quite a challenge.”

Intensely private, he has been described as “an icy cold poker player” whose boss once jokingly called him “an automaton,” according to a description in “More Money Than God,” a book about the hedge fund industry by Sebastian Mallaby.

Before joining Renaissance Technologies, Mr. Mercer, 68, worked at I.B.M.’s research center, where he specialized in computerized translation of languages.

While little of his private life has been made public, some details have emerged in recent court cases. In 2013, a group of former workers at his house sued him for not paying overtime. They also accused him of deducting money from their semi-annual bonuses as a form of punishment for, among other things, failing to replace shampoos, close doors and change razor blades. “The matter has been resolved amicably,” Troy L. Kessler, a lawyer for the employees, said.

In 2009, Mr. Mercer sued RailDreams, a toy train manufacturer, and its president, Richard Taylor, for overcharging him $2 million for a contract to build and install a model train and railway set at his home.

Mr. Mercer has said nothing publicly about his financial backing for Mr. Cruz’s campaign or how he came to support him. But his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, who started a bakery in Manhattan called Ruby et Violette, has been more vocal. This week she held a fund-raiser for Mr. Cruz at her Manhattan apartment.

When James H. Simons, the billionaire founder of the Renaissance hedge fund, hired Mr. Mercer in 1993, the company was more university campus than Wall Street firm. Mr. Simons, a mathematician and former code-breaker for the National Security Agency, brought in astronomers and physicists to analyze reams of data, using computer programs to search for patterns that could be used to inform trading decisions. Mr. Simons has been a major political backer of Democrats, donating $8.3 million in 2014.

The hedge fund’s strategy has been tremendously successful. The firm’s flagship Medallion fund, which manages money only for employees today, has earned average annual returns of 35 percent for two decades. Over all, the firm manages $25 billion, much of it employees’ money.

Renaissance was also able to increase returns by borrowing large sums of money, but the practice eventually caught the attention of Washington and government agencies. Last year the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused Renaissance of using complex financial structures that allowed it to underestimate how much it owed the Internal Revenue Service by $6 billion.

Taxpayers “had to shoulder the tax burden these hedge funds shrugged off with the aid of the banks,” Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said at a hearing last summer.

The I.R.S. has been investigating Renaissance for at least six years. A spokesman for the firm said its tax practices were legal and appropriate.

Mr. Cruz’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Mercer’s support for his candidacy or his hedge fund’s $6 billion tax issue.

But the candidate, like his new Wall Street backer, has his own concerns about the I.R.S., which might have gotten Mr. Mercer’s attention. Last month, he called for the agency to be abolished altogether.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Cruz Campaign’s Striking Start, a Donor of Few Words. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe